This was a Talking Web newsletter on 17 February 2026 - join the newsletter here.

Hi,

Hope February is going well for you! A reminder that it’s Pancake Day today, for anyone who celebrates it or just likes the excuse to have pancakes.

We’re hurtling through February half term here, and I am rather proud of the volcano presentation I’ve been working on with my 8 year old. It lights up, guys!

Anywho – this week’s task is designed to be a quick email if you’re also juggling Half Term. But its super super important.

Where is your site backed up?

If your site is a hosted solution, like SquareSpace or Wix, then you’re OK – back ups are their job.

But if you pay for hosting, because you’ve got a WordPress website or a bespoke CMS or, well, basically a “normal” website, then if something goes wrong, you’re gonna want a back up.

You generally have to pay for back ups.

And you ideally want “off site” back ups.

Because back ups come into play for 1 of 2 reasons:

  1. If the data centre hosting your website suddenly gets wrecked – it’s destroyed by a fire or a flood or something nasty – then you don’t want your back up to just have been on another computer in the same building. Because your back up will have been wrecked too.

So you want “off site” back ups. Back ups that are securely stored in a different location to the main website.

(BUT if a back up includes your user’s data – which it will, if you store user data in any way in your database – then you need to consider GDPR and letting people know what you’re doing with their data if you keep a copy elsewhere.)

2. If your website gets hacked, or ruined by accident. In this case, your site might be riddled with a hacked code that you can’t surely get rid of completely. Or someone in the team might have accidentally deleted half of your users without meaning to.

No matter the reason, if your site is the problem rather than the data center or infrastructure, then you want to revert back to an older version of your website from before the disaster.

In this case, it doesn’t matter if the back ups were off site or not, you just need a clean, complete copy of the site code and database.

How to make sure you’ve got back ups:

  1. (Hopefully this is the case for you…) Just email your developer and ask them if you’ve got them. If they don’t know, or they aren’t the ones who set up the site, raise a support ticket with your hosting provider.
  2. If you haven’t, ask your hosts for their options. Most of our clients pay around £5pm for off site back ups and peace of mind.

Important extra step:

If your developer confirms you have got back ups, they’ll probably have a login to access them. Ask them to log in and check that they’re there, backing up as they should.

We’ve known it before when a hosting company was selling a client back ups, but when we actually checked, the back ups weren’t backing up properly. That would have been gutting in an emergency.

Good to know:

Restoring from a back up often isn’t a quick job. You only want to be calling on these back ups in an actual massive emergency – hopefully never.

So don’t think, if you delete a page of text “oh I’ll just ask my developer to restore the back up”, because it usually won’t be worth the time, money and hassle.

But you still need them for that hopefully-never big emergency!

Have a good week,

Lisa

PS. Next week on Instagram I’m posting a reel a day with quick easy SEO fundamentals – make sure you’re following along.